I wish Charles Schultz were still alive, because I think he’d be able to help me in my search to identify what love really is. He had the ability to capture a feeling in just a few words when he wrote “Happiness is a warm puppy.” Enough said. In that brief sentence, he evokes inside us exactly what happiness really is.
I don’t have the eloquence or the insight of Charles Schultz, so I’m going to have to go about this a different way. I need to take Paul’s approach instead. Paul breaks down for us in great detail what love is, what it’s components and attributes are from different perspectives. He tears apart the concept and rebuilds is for us bit by bit until the sculpture is complete.
But my brain can’t quite wrap itself around it all at once, and I need to go a step further. I’m going to take each point he makes one at a time and try to rip into it, make some sense of it, connect it to my reality and my world, and figure out where my perceptions and mistakes fit into God’s idea of what love is.
Here’s the list Paul gives us:
- Patient
- Kind
- Not envious
- Not boastful
- Not proud
- Not rude
- Not self-seeking
- Not easily angered
- Keeps no record of wrongs
- Does not delight in evil
- Rejoices with the truth
- Protects
- Trusts
- Hopes
- Perseveres
- Never fails
Interesting that none of these at first glance have anything to do with feelings. But love is most certainly a feeling and I don’t think it can be real if there are no feelings attached to it. Love without feeling becomes duty, obligation, legalism. So part of my search will be to connect the passionless list with the intense and varied emotions that go along with love. On the one hand, all of these things seem obvious, but on the other hand, sometimes they seem so impossible and so far from how I experience love. Or maybe what I think is love is something different and I have absolutely no idea what I’m talking about….
Being a logical, sequential, rational person (just the way God made me), I plan to tackle each of these points one at a time, explore it, think about it, pick it apart, and see what I find in the middle. Maybe on the other end of it, something will eventually make some sense.
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